Louis Aragon (1897 – 1982)
Biography
Louis Aragon (October 3, 1897 – December 24, 1982), French historian, poet and novelist, and a member of the Académie Goncourt.
Aragon was a member of the Dada and subsequently the surrealist circles.
In 1939 he married Russian-born author Elsa Triolet (born 1896), the sister-in-law of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
During the World War II German occupation of France he wrote for the underground press Les Éditions de Minuit, and was one of several writers who adopted the name of a French region as a pen name.
One noted Aragon poem is "Red Poster," in which he honoured foreigners who died while fighting to free France. One Nazi propoganda campaign was named Red Poster. The campaign aimed to convince the French people that the resistance movement was composed of foreigners, mainly Jewish, who served the interests of England and Russia.
After the death of his wife on June 16, 1970, Aragon revealed his bisexuality and appeared at gay pride parades in a pink convertible (Ivry 1996, p.134). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Aragon [Sept 2005]
Paris Peasant (1926) - Louis Aragon
Paris Peasant (1926) - Louis Aragon [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, a work that helps define the movement itself; yet this is the first U.S. publication of Simon Watson Taylor’s authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author. Unconventional in form — Aragon self-consciously avoided any recognizable narration or character development — but fiercely lyrical, Paris Peasant is, in the author’s words, "a mythology of the modern." The book uses the city of Paris as a framework, and Aragon interlaces his text with the city’s ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments, newspaper clippings, as well as the lives of its citizens. A detailed description of a Parisian passage, nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall, and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are the great set pieces within Aragon’s swirling prose of philosophy, dream, and satire.
"No one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city.…" — André Breton
"I was seeking… a new kind of novel that would break all the traditional rules governing the writing of fiction… a novel that the critics would be obliged to approach empty-handed." — Louis Aragon --via Amazon
See also: 1926 - arcade - peasant - Paris - Paris arcades - surrealism - literature - France
Le Con d'Irène/Irene's Cunt (1928) - Louis Aragon
Le Con d'Irène/Irene's Cunt (1928) - Louis Aragon
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Image sourced here.: an illustration by André Masson
Book Description
First published anonymously in France in 1928, Le Con d'Irène, is the last 'lost' masterpiece of Surrealist erotica. Likes Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (published the same year), Irene's Cunt is an intensely poetic account, the story of a man's torment when he becomes fixated upon the genitalia of an imaginary woman and is reduced to voyeuristically scoping 'her' erotic encounters. In between describing various events in brothels and other sexual adventures, Louis Aragon charts an inner monologue which is often reminiscent, in its poetic/ surreal intensity, of the work of Lautreamont, and of Artaud in its evocation of physical disgust as the dark correlative to spiritual illumination.
This new edition features an exceptional and completely unexpurgated translation by Alexis Lykiard (translator of Lautreamont's Maldoror and Apollinaire's Les Onze Mille Vierges), and includes complete annotation and an illuminating introduction. --via Amazon
Times Literary Supplement
This work of genius...a lyrically urgent evocation of the mystical core of true sexual carnality. --via Amazon
See also: André Masson - Creation Books - cunt - erotic fiction - surrealism - literature - France
Flesh Unlimited - Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon
Flesh Unlimited is a compendium edition of three classic erotic/ surrealist novellas: Les Onze Mille Vierges and Les Mémoires d'un Jeune Don Juan by Guillaume Appollinaire and Le Con d'Irène by Louis Aragon.
Dadaist poet Guillaume Apollinaire fine-tuned his uniquely poetic and surreal vision to produce these two materpieces of the explicit erotic imagination at the turn of the century, works which compare with the best of the Marquis de Sade. In Les Onze Milles Vierges, debauched aristocrat Mony Vibescu and a circle of fellow sybarites blaze a trail of uncontrollable lust, bloody cruelty and depravity across the streets of Europe. Whilst in Les Mémoires d'un Jeune Don Juan, a young man reminisces his sexual awakening at the hands of his aunt, his sister and their friends as he is utterly corrupted in a season of carnal excess.
Louis Aragon's Le Con d'Irène is the intense story of a man's torment when he becomes fixated upon the genitalia of an imaginary woman and is reduced to voyeuristically scoping her erotic encounters in-between describing various events in brothels and other sexual adventures.
Translated from the original, complete and unexpurgated versions by Alexis Lykiard (translator of Lautréamonts Maldoror), Flesh Unlimited has a general introduction and notes section. --amazon.com
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